At Droptica, remote work is something ordinary. From the very first day, we had two offices in Wrocław and Gdańsk. Recently, we also opened our third office in Rzeszów. Every day, developers, testers, graphic designers and other specialists work together in each of these locations. In addition, 90% of our clients come from abroad, like in the case of most software houses. Throughout several years, we have developed methods of effective and efficient cooperation in a dispersed team. We are constantly improving our work model, testing new tools and ways of working. In this article, you will learn how our system works today.

Project management support system

Since the beginning of Droptica’s existence, we have been using Redmine. Redmine had several add-ons, including Backlogs module supporting work in the Scrum model. These days, we are using Jira, since it works even better with Scrum. Both systems help us to control what is going on with the projects. Each of the projects is divided into sprints, and each sprint is divided further into specific tasks. All information about the realisation of every task is saved and stored in Jira. Our clients also have access to our Jira for full transparency. In our opinion, such a system is a necessity. Without it, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to control what is going on with the project, especially in the case of projects running for many months. E-mail communication is completely unsuitable for this purpose.

Two communication speeds

Project management support systems are very useful, but not sufficient for efficient implementation of the project. Members of the team must be able to communicate comfortably and quickly. If the team works in one office, it is enough to just talk to somebody and ask. In the case of a dispersed team, this issue becomes quite complex. Writing an e-mail or adding a ticket in Jira to ask a quick question takes time. Most often, you have to do the following:

open Jira;

find a project;

find the right task;

add a comment;

check in a while if there is an answer;

This process often takes far more time than simply asking the question and getting an answer, especially when it’s a “yes/no” type of question.

At Droptica, we solve this problem by communicating using Slack. Thanks to this application, our distributed team works as if all the members were located in one office. We communicate quickly and efficiently. We eliminate unnecessary e-mails, phone calls and video conferences. The number of comments to tasks in Jira also goes way down – this is helpful because they often make it difficult to analyse the status of work on a given task.

Slack at Droptica

We set up several channels for each project. Channels are used to eliminate as many notifications and as much communication via e-mails as possible and to split up messages thematically.

Most often, we set up the following chat channels:

projectname chat – a channel for internal communication regarding the project. This channel is used by the entire development team, as well as project support team (DevOps, testers, etc.);

projectname client - a channel available to the client and the development team. This channel is a place for communicating with the client, asking quick questions about tasks, setting up meeting dates, calls, etc;

channels with notifications from the systems used in connection with a given project, such as Jira, Jenkins, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. Usually, each system gets its own channel. Every person can join channels that are important for them and eliminate notifications that are not important or redundant, for example, a graphic designer does not need to read GitHub notifications.

Before Slack, we used group chats on Skype, then we moved on to HipChat for a while. We found Slack to be the best solution that fits our needs perfectly and we do not plan to move to any other solution any time soon. It is also important that our clients often already use Slack, which makes it easy for them to join our channels as another organisation.

Other tools supporting remote working

Daily Scrum

There is no Scrum without Daily Scrum. In a dispersed team, it is necessary to conduct a video conference once a day. Sometimes such calls are also attended by the representative of the client, who is often hundreds or thousands of miles away from our offices. We conduct these meetings using several tools, depending on the preferences of the team or our client. Usually, we go for Google Hangouts Meet, but sometimes we resort to Zoom.us and Skype For Business.

Scrum Retrospective

For this purpose, we use a simple Google Docs sheet. We have a sheet with the following columns:

drop - what we should stop doing if it's possible;

keep - what is good and what we should keep doing;

improve - what needs to be improved;

add - what we need to add in order to better carry out the work on the project.

The worksheet contains a history of all retrospectives in the form that is easy to view and edit. The document is available to all team members, regardless of their location. This is working very well for us.

Code review

We review the code on GitHub or Bitbucket, depending on the project. These systems allow to easily browse the code and add comments to selected script lines. There is no need for one person to come to the other person's desk to view the quality of the code.

We also have several internal tools and scripts for automating tests that support Drupal development.

Good remote working practices

In my opinion, it is not possible to rely only on communication via e-mail or Jira. Video conferences and telephone calls are necessary to better understand each other. This greatly improves communication within the development team and between the client and the team. One could say that working according to the Scrum methodology forces us to do so. Every day, we carry out Daily Scrum in the form of a video chat. We also often have video calls with customers, for example during the Sprint Review or during the Backlog Refinement. Every once in a while, we also meet with the client at our office or we pay them a visit.

It is also important for the communication process to work in a way that does not disturb others too often. Slack is a very useful tool, but it can also lead to too many unnecessary messages, which can be distracting and interrupt work. The team should be aware of this and use Slack only when necessary and send messages only to those who need them. We try to never involve people whose presence is not necessary in a given case.

Is remote working better than working in one office?

Having the entire team working in one office certainly makes communication much easier. However, it also has its drawbacks – for example, it makes it much easier to disturb somebody while working with unnecessary discussions. Sometimes this can reduce productivity.

At Droptica we combine remote work with office work, which enables us to take advantage of both models. If necessary, we build teams working at just one office.
More than one location gives us a competitive advantage because we have access to more specialists from three cities and their general areas. This allows us to build great development teams for our clients.

The fact that Droptica has multiple offices also forces all of our team members to learn how to work remotely. That’s why all of our experts know how to work with a remote client right away.

Summary

At Droptica, we developed a remote working system that works very well for us. I think that such a model is by no means worse than working in one office, additionally, it also offers many benefits. If you are looking for a team of Drupal, PHP, Symfony or ReactJS experts, we will be happy to assist you and show you that communication with a remote team can also be great.